


Not every post needs a reminder of everything

by Franzeska



Series: March Meta Matters [4]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23023981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: But as long as someone brought it up, I'll discuss
Series: March Meta Matters [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664836
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Posted for day 4 of the March Meta Matters Challenge.
> 
> This is an old tumblr post that was a spinoff of my Fandom Purges posts. I saw some mealy-mouthed tags about how we must note that fandom is racist. "But why don't you talk about X" is a tag I see on every meta post, and it irritates me even when I agree that X is a real thing that is important to discuss.
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/189376615364/wishforsomewherenew-reblogged-your-post-a-new

> ”#fandom#i feel like i need to start adding caveats to these reblogs#cuz i agree with the general sentiment of ‘theres a reason AO3 exists’#but there should be reminders about the anti-blackness throughout this fandom history and embedded in fandom/AO3 as well#like hello racefail is a thing from fandom history where’s any discussion about that in this context#so here’s a caveat#fandom is racist

I agree that this is an issue with fandom, but it’s not something I’d tend to include on a list of times things were deleted. There isn’t a campaign to delete fanworks about black characters, just a persistent lack of those fanworks in the first place.

This is also not a problem we will solve by building a better platform or preserving fandom history better. Thus it wasn’t something I felt was relevant to that post.

IMO, a huge part of the problem is coming directly from the media we consume, especially the cinematography and editing. Characters who are awesome and equal on the page are not at all equal once you see the final product.

I did a couple of video meta pieces on how this plays out in The Losers with Cougar and Aisha. (To summarize: The film takes us inside Cougar’s head/emotions making him extra popular to write about and from the POV of because the writer can get inside his head. Aisha is an objectified love interest. She’s super cool, but we’re very explicitly outside her in canon, making her harder to write in fic. The film specifically skimps on empathy with Aisha, just as many canons do with female characters and even more do with black characters. Audiences pick up on and replicate this problem.)

The proposals I’ve seen to fix issues on AO3 seem to mostly revolve around trying to get rid of Reylo, which is worse than useless. There are plenty of black fans of Reylo, and Finn isn’t unpopular. It’s just Finnrey specifically that people aren’t into. We can’t mandate ship popularity. That has never worked and never will.

A lot of the criticism also tends to focus on how “fandom” is all about “two white men”, when, in fact, FFN and many older fandom spaces were aaaall about white het, not white slash. (I’m not saying don’t criticize, just that it isn’t a m/m issue. It’s an all-of-fandom issue. The overabundance of m/m on AO3 is due to historical pressures chasing m/m off of other sites.)

Looking at older fandoms, specifically Rico from Miami Vice (MY FAVE!), I see a lot of situations where fans were interested in black characters, but gatekeepers kept that fic from getting seen. Because everything was in zines, you were at the mercy of the people who had the resources to publish one. If the zine publisher hated your ship, you basically couldn’t share your fic with the fandom. So that’s a case of fic being literally suppressed, but that’s not common anymore.

Today, there is much less structural gatekeeping. That’s one big positive: you can share your fanworks. The issue on sites like AO3 is how easy it is to get lost in the crowd. If you’re making fanworks of something relatively less popular, it’s hard to generate buzz and increase the activeness of that part of your fandom.

I’ve seen a bit of meta about how AO3 has very white ships because it isn’t a safe space for fans of color. I know a number of people feel this way, but I also see a lot of counterpoints from other fans of color saying that they ship Reylo or Sterek or whatever target du jour, and that a safe space for them does _not_ look like an archive where you can stamp whole ships as bad.

Ultimately, I think the actual solution has to come from media itself. We need more canons where black characters occupy the _same_ iddy roles that fandom currently loves. Almost Human was a sucky show, and Fox messed it up (as usual!), but the _idea_ of Almost Human is the kind of thing we need. We need more canons like Leverage or Hustle. Specifically, we need the black actors to be cast as:

  * the lead with the will-they-won’t they tension with the other lead
  * the single-perfect-tear woobie
  * the dashing jewel thief
  * the snarky geek

And not as:

  * the supportive best friend, free therapist, and feelings babysitter

And we need more media that is fun genre stuff of the type we already write lots of fic about, only with more black characters. What we don’t need is to turn liking black characters into a moral duty and a source of shame, anxiety, and work. POC being seen as less default and media, including fic, about characters of color being seen as inherently about Serious Depressing Issues is a big part of the problem.

Many of the AO3-related proposals I’ve seen are really about getting rid of Bad Tropes or Bad Ships. I think that trying to promote fic/ships that are less white but otherwise exactly as problematic, iddy, fun, and varied as what is currently popular may eventually work. Trying to get people to do a 180 in their fic tastes isn’t.

That’s what I immediately think of when I see a comment about how we should always include a caveat about AO3 being anti-black.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone asked a followup question about whether it _actually works_ to put more black characters in media. I maintain that it does and that we can see this when we look at the rare piece of media that gives us standard iddy fanbait with a black lead. (Though, of course, they have a point that it's not that easy or simple.)
> 
> https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/189470396729/it-does-work-eventually

> #fandom#good points of reflexion although I wonder#if a story places a black character in a position usually filled by a white character#will the audience react to it the same way?#I fear racism would stick us into a corner where people would suddenly find flaws to the archetypes they usually like#because we know people tend to be less indulgent with poc in general#so the snarky geek would suddenly be read as pedant and annoying#and the dashing thief would be read as a thief#which isn’t to say we shouldn’t try to give these roles to poc#we need poc in more diverse roles!#just saying I’m not sure white fandom would just naturally follow#there is work that needs to be done directly with the audience#but it’s certain that this work needs to be larger and more thought out than deleting entire popular ships

In practice, it’s a mix. The canons where the dashing thief, woobie, or geek is black are sometimes less popular overall than a similar canon where that character is white. On the other hand, part of the issue is that fandom size is roughly correlated to canon viewership, and it’s rare for a massive, massive franchise to cast a black lead in installment 1.

Fandom trends tend to get set very early in a canon’s history, and expanding the cast later doesn’t always change them. Black Panther was never going to derail the Stucky train or any of the other big established patterns of MCU fandom. Neither was introducing Sam, though Sam/Steve did get pretty popular. New Star Wars is a rare case where there was a black lead from the beginning in a super mega franchise, and Finn/Poe was the biggest ship by far right at the beginning of that fandom. It dropped behind Kylux and Reylo later, but it’s obvious that people did like Finn. That kind of casting and role _does_ work. If people did more of it, it would work better.

The trouble is that the vast majority of fandom meta acts like an average fandom should look like MCU or Harry Potter. In reality, those are extreme outliers that are completely irrelevant to how most fandoms operate. Most genre media with black leads is material with a much smaller viewership than a MCU movie. Those media have smaller fandoms, but the black lead is usually pretty popular relative to the overall fandom size if they are indeed a trope fandom likes for white characters.

The three examples I chose weren’t random. They were from the three shows I mentioned: Hustle, Leverage, and Almost Human.

Hustle is a small fandom, at least for fic, and a moderately popular TV series overall. The original team leader, suave con artist Mickey Bricks (played by Adrian Lester) was one of the more popular characters. Mickey/Danny tends to be one of the biggest ships, and Mickey/Danny/Stacy is reasonably popular too.

Leverage is quite a popular fandom, and Hardison, the geek, is a fandom fave The big ship is the OT3 of Parker, Hardison, and Eliot. The component ships are also popular, especially the canon one of Parker and Hardison.

Almost Human was a bit of a trianwreck, but the entire fandom is basically shippers of the woobie android Dorian (played by Michael Ealy) and grumpy android-hating cop John Kennex.

Yeah, fandom can be pretty racist, but give us a Caves of Steel ripoff, and we will _always_ go for the ship of the woobie bot and the human bot-hater who learns to be a better man–and probably gives gratuitous speeches about it in the process. It doesn’t matter if it’s DRN or RK800 or R. Daneel Olivaw: this trope is fannish catnip.

In fact, DBH and Almost Human are an excellent case study of this: They’re remarkably similar, right down to Minka Kelly being wasted in a trite love interest role. Both have a black android, but in AH, he’s one half of the iddy buddy cop duo (and popular for shipping), while in DBH, the equivalent character is white (and similarly popular). The black android in DBH gets saddled with some pretty dire civil rights allegories as he leads the android revolution. He has more foils with less iddy ship fodder for each, and his canon het ship is not very popular. People do talk about the character positively, but they don’t write all that much fic about him.

Characters of color do get held to a higher standard, but a lot of the problems are often coming directly from canon, even if they’re sometimes subtle. The rare canons that do a better job produce fandoms that appreciate the characters of color.

It helps to have ridiculous episodes involving bets, rivalry, and public nudity…

Or hurt/comfort…

Or Leverage’s… everything.

The main issue is that we need **100x** the amount of media with a black character in a lead or main ensemble role that is specifically the Fandom Fave role. We need that media to be big budget and omnipresent, and we need that to be the status quo for a decade. That wouldn’t magically erase racism, but it _would_ have a dramatic effect on what fic gets written.

Look at Sleepy Hollow! That show jumped the shark like whoa, but no matter how much people complain about the evil fans who liked the canon ship, 99% of that fandom is actually Ichabbie shippers. Even on AO3, bastion of inexplicable white man slash, most of it is still Ichabod/Abbie or Ichabod & Abbie.

Right now, the status quo is that these sources are rare, and fandom theorizing tends to ignore them in favor of a tiny handful of the biggest fandoms in fandom history. We’ll get another Almost Human long, _long_ before we’ll get a superhero franchise where something like Black Panther is the _first_ movie out of the gate. (Though, to be honest, Black Panther has like 3x the fic of most of my fandoms, and most of it is about T’Challa, so it’s doing pretty well.)

I’ll be interested to see what happens with the Rivers of London TV adaptation. I suspect that will provide both the next big fandom fave who is black and a breeding ground for toxic wank so horrendous it drives half the fandom away–Because whatever standard fans hold characters of color to in canon, it’s a thousand times worse in fic.


End file.
